ZAMBOANGA CITY, 29 January — Hunting Abu Sayyaf bandits on the hostile island-province of Basilan could be a perilous game for US troops unfamiliar with its terrain.
The name Basilan—literally “the iron trail’’—evokes foreign military expeditions through the centuries that have come to grief there.
US troops are massing in this port city for the coming war games in nearby Basilan that could eventually bring them in conflict with the Abu Sayyaf bandits and a potentially hostile Muslim population of about 335,000.
“Without using air attacks like they did on Afghanistan and if they use only infantry, they would be crushed, massacred in the jungle,’’ said Prof. Samsullah Adju, a former chancellor of the Mindanao State University.
“Assuming the US can wipe out the Abu Sayyaf, the relief would be temporary because the relatives of the bandits and all those who might have been victimized will continue to fight,” said Dumarpa Faysah, an assemblyman of the Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao that covers Basilan.
Fielding US troops in Basilan could also inadvertently “trigger a bigger war’’ should they encroach on spheres of influence of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the main separatist group which has opened talks and signed a truce with Manila.
Muslim sultans from Borneo settled in Basilan and spread Islam in Mindanao in the 14th century. Spanish forces arrived about 300 years later but failed to Christianize Basilan. A company of Spanish soldiers was massacred in one battle.
The province is ringed by about 60 smaller islands, long used by pirates to waylay vessels and sack Christian communities in the Basilan Strait.
When Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States in 1898, American troops were deployed in the southern frontier to control Muslim provinces.
“Many of them were killed,” Adju said.
The US troops were often baffled by Moro fanatics called “juramentados’’ who wielded machetes and made suicidal charges through the enemy frontlines.
“They dodged bullets and the .45 cal. automatic, according to the story, was devised to stop them in their tracks,” Adju said.
“Muslims here like to fight America, which to them is a classic oppressor.’’
MILF spokesman Eid Kabalu said his group would not attack the Americans without provocation. Even so, US “lives’’ will be on the line, he added.
The Abu Sayyaf bandits “may be small in number, but fighting here has never been conventional and they know the jungle like the back of their hands,’’ Kabalu said.
“They are like the creature Hydra—you cut one head and two others grow in their place.’’
